The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale () is a narrative poem written by Alexander Pushkin in 1833 about the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg and the great flood of 1824. While the poem was written in 1833, it was not published in its entirety until after Pushkin's death, as his work was under censorship due to the political nature of his other writings. Widely considered to be Pushkin's most successful narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman has had a lasting impact on Russian literature. The Pushkin critic A. D. P. Briggs praises the poem "as the best in the Russian language, and even the best poem written anywhere in the nineteenth century".Briggs, A. D. P. "Mednyy vsadnik [The Bronze Horseman]". The Literary Encyclopedia. 26 April 2005.accessed 30 November 2008. It is considered one of the most influential works in Russian literature and is one of the reasons Pushkin is often called the "founder of modern Russian literature".
The statue became known as The Bronze Horseman due to the great influence of the poem.For general comments on the poem's success and influence, see Binyon, T. J. (2002), Pushkin: A Biography. London: Harper Collins, p. 437; Rosenshield, Gary. (2003), Pushkin and the Genres of Madness. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, p. 91; Cornwell, Neil (ed.) (1998), Reference Guide to Russian Literature. London: Taylor and Francis, p. 677.
Plot summary The poem is divided into three sections: a shorter introduction (90 lines) and two longer parts (164 and 222 lines). The introduction opens with a mythologized history of the establishment of the city of Saint Petersburg in 1703. In the first two stanzas, Peter the Great stands at the edge of the River Neva and conceives the idea for a city which will threaten the Swedes and open a "window to Europe". The poem describes the area as almost uninhabited: Peter can only see one boat and a handful of dark houses inhabited by Finnish peasants. Saint Petersburg was in fact constructed on territory newly regained from the Swedes in the Great Northern War, and Peter himself chose the site for the founding of a major city because it provided Russia with a corner of access to the Baltic Sea, and thus to the Atlantic and Europe.
The rest of the introduction is in the first person and reads as an ode to the city of Petersburg. The poet-narrator describes how he loves Petersburg, including the city's "stern, muscular appearance" (l. 44), its landmarks such as the Admiralty (ll. 50–58), and its harsh winters and long summer evenings (ll. 59 – ll. 84). He encourages the city to retain its beauty and strength and stand firm against the waves of the Neva (ll. 85–91).
Part I opens with an image of the Neva growing rough in a storm: the river is "tossing and turning like a sick man in his troubled bed" (ll. 5–6). Against this backdrop, a young poor man in the city, Evgenii, is contemplating his love for a young woman, Parasha, and planning to spend the rest of his life with her (ll. 49–62). Evgenii falls asleep, and the narrative then turns back to the Neva, with a description of how the river floods and destroys much of the city (ll. 72–104). The frightened and desperate Evgenii is left sitting alone on top of two marble lions on Peter's Square, surrounded by water and with the Bronze Horseman statue looking down on him (ll. 125–164).
In Part II, Evgenii finds a ferryman and commands him to row to where Parasha's home used to be (ll. 26 – ll. 56). However, he discovers that her home has been destroyed (ll. 57–60), and falls into a crazed delirium and breaks into laughter (ll. 61–65). For a year, he roams the street as a madman (ll. 89–130), but the following autumn, he is reminded of the night of the storm (ll. 132–133) and the source of his troubles. In a fit of rage, he curses the statue of Peter (ll. 177–179), which brings the statue to life, and Peter begins pursuing Evgenii (ll. 180–196). The narrator does not describe Evgenii's death directly, but the poem closes with the discovery of his corpse in a ruined hut floating on the water (ll. 219–222).
Genre Formally, the poem is an unusual mix of genres: the sections dealing with Tsar Peter are written in a solemn, odic, 18th-century style, while the Evgenii sections are prosaic, playful and, in the latter stages, filled with pathos.See V. Ia. Briusov's 1929 essay on "The Bronze Horseman", available here (in Russian). This mix of genres is anticipated by the title: "The Bronze Horseman" suggested a grandiose ode, but the subtitle "A Petersburg Tale" leads one to expect an unheroic protagonist.Rosenshield, p. 91. Metrically, the entire poem is written using the four-foot iamb, one of Pushkin's preferred meters, a versatile form which is able to adapt to the changing mood of the poem. The poem has a varied rhyme scheme and stanzas of varying length.Little, p. xiv.
The critic Michael Wachtel has suggested that Pushkin intended to produce a national epic in this poem, arguing that the Peter sections have many of the typical features of epic poetry.Wachtel, Michael. (2006) "Pushkin's long poems and the epic impulse". In Andrew Kahn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Puskhin, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 83–84. He points to Pushkin's extensive use of Old Testament language and allusions when describing both the founding of St Petersburg and the flood and argues that they draw heavily on the Book of Genesis. Further evidence for the categorization of Pushkin's poem as an epic can be seen in its rhyme scheme and stanza structure which allow the work to convey its meaning in a very concise yet artistic manner.Newman, John Kevin. "Pushkin's Bronze Horseman and the Epic Tradition." Comparative Literature Studies 9.2 (1972): p. 187.JSTOR. Penn State University Press. Another parallel to the classical epic tradition can be drawn in the final scenes of Evgenii's burial, described as "for God's sake." In Russian, this phrase is not one of "chafing impatience, but of the kind of appeal to Christian sentiment which a beggar might make" according to Newman.Newman, p. 190 Therefore, it is a lack of empathy and charity in Petersburg that ultimately causes Evgenii's death. The requirement that civilization must have a moral order is a theme also found in the writings of Virgil. However, Wachtel adds that the Evgenii plot runs counter to the epic mode, and praises Pushkin for his "remarkable ability to synthesize diverse materials, styles and genres".Wachtel, p. 86. What is particularly unusual is that Pushkin focuses on a protagonist who is of humble background, as well as one who is ostensibly great. There are more questions than answers in this new type of epic, where "an agnostic irony can easily find a place" while "the unbiased reader would be forced to recognize as concerned with the profoundest issues which confront humanity".Newman, p. 176 He concludes that if the poem is to be labeled a national epic, it is a "highly idiosyncratic" one.
Historical and cultural context Several critics have suggested that the immediate inspiration for The Bronze Horseman was the work of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz.Pushkin's own footnotes refer to Mickiewicz's poem 'Oleskiewicz' which describe the 1824 flood in Petersburg. See also Little, p. xiii; Binyon, pp. 435–6 Before beginning work on The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin had read Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve (1823–1832), which contains a poem entitled "To My Muscovite Friends", a thinly veiled attack on Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky for their failure to join the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825. Forefather's Eve contains poems where Peter I is described as a despot who created the city because of autocratic whim, and a poem mocks the Falconet statue as looking as though he is about to jump off a precipice. Pushkin's poem can be read in part as a retort to Mickiewicz, although most critics agree that its concerns are much broader than answering a political enemy.See Binyon, p. 435; Little, p. xiii; Bayley, John (1971), Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 128.
There are distinct similarities between Pushkin's protagonist in The Bronze Horseman, and that of his other work Eugene Onegin. Originally, Pushkin wanted to continue Eugene Onegin in this narrative, but instead chose to make a new Evgenii, with a different family name but who was still a "caricature of Pushkin's own character".Wilson, p. 67. Both were descendants of the old regime of Boyars that now found itself socially insignificant in a society where family heritage was not esteemed.
The statue The Bronze Horseman of the title was sculpted by Étienne Maurice Falconet and completed in 1782. Catherine the Great, a German princess who married into the Romanov family, commissioned the construction of the statue to legitimize her rule and claim to the throne to the Russian people; she had actually come to power through an illegal palace coup. She had the statue inscribed with the phrase "To Peter the first, from Catherine the second" in both Latin and Russian, meaning to show reverence to the ruler and indicate where she saw her place among Russia's rulers.
The statue took 12 years to make. It depicts Peter the Great astride his horse, his outstretched arm reaching toward the Neva River in the western part of the country. The statue is lauded for its ambiguity; in a book about Petersburg in 1821, the French statesman Joseph de Maistre commented that he did not know "whether Peter's bronze hand protects or threatens". It is said that Pushkin felt the ambiguous message of the statue and was inspired to pen the poem.
The city of St. Petersburg St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century, on the swampy shores and islands of the Neva. The difficulties of construction were numerous, but Peter was unperturbed by the expenditure of human life required to fulfil his vision of a city on the coast. Of the artisans whom he compelled to come north to lay the foundations of the city, thousands died of hardship and disease; and the city, in its unnatural location, was at the mercy of terrible floods caused by the breaking-up of the ice of Lake Ladoga just to the east – as on the occasion described in the poem – by the west wind blowing back the Neva. There had been one such devastating flood in 1777 and again in 1824, during Pushkin's time and the flood modeled in the poem, and they continued until the Saint Petersburg Dam, completed in 2011, was built.
Themes
Statue vs. Evgenii The conflict between Tsar and subject, or empire and individual, is a key theme of The Bronze Horseman.Little, p. xix; Bayley, p. 131. Critics differ as to whether Pushkin ultimately sides with Evgenii—the little man—or Peter and historical necessity. The radical 19th-century critic Vissarion Belinsky considered the poem a vindication of Peter's policies, while the writer Dmitri Merezhkovsky thought it a poem of individual protest.Cited in Banjeree, Maria. (1978) "Pushkin's 'The Bronze Horseman': An Agonistic Vision". Modern Languages Studies, 8, no. 2, Spring, p. 42.
Another interpretation of the poem suggests that the statue does not actually come to life, but that Evgenii loses his sanity. Pushkin makes Evgenii go mad to create "a terrifying dimension to even the most humdrum personality and at the same time show the abyss hidden in the most apparently common-place human soul". In this regard, Evgenii is seen to become a disinherited man of the time in much the same vein as a traditional epic hero.Newman, p. 189.